


In Kind

by Lovejoy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/M, Gen, Ninken | Ninja Dogs, Trick or Treat: Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-07-24 15:49:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16178240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lovejoy/pseuds/Lovejoy
Summary: Sakura saves Kakashi. Then he helps her save herself.





	In Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crunchysunrises](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crunchysunrises/gifts).



> Thank you to R for the beta!

“Yo,” Kakashi said, halfway through her window.

Sakura stared at him, shocked. Then he tipped forward and collapsed in a heap on her floor.

She dropped the kunai she’d been holding and rushed over to him, heart in her throat. She was gathering chakra to her palms before he’d even hit the ground, and used it now to check him over, pushing it through his body in gentle probing waves. He was still breathing, but he was getting blood everywhere, his abdomen soaked with it, sticky and wet. What she could see of his face was waxen and sheened in cold sweat.

“You idiot,” she said, pushing down a flare of panic. “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

“Your place was closer,” Kakashi mumbled, low and strained.

Sakura glared at him. Did he seriously expect her to believe that? “What if I’d been on shift? What if I’d been on a mission? What if I’d been—out?” _I would’ve come home to a corpse. I would’ve had to deal with my sensei’s dead body, and know that if I’d been here, I could’ve saved him._

The thought made her eyes sting. Stupid, selfish man.

“Good thing you’re not,” Kakashi said, surprisingly confident for a man who was holding his own guts inside his body. His eye fluttered and began to drift closed. She smacked his cheek, and he blinked rapidly. “Stay with me,” she said tersely. He didn’t answer, but his eye remained open, half-lidded and grey as slate. “If you die in my living room, I’ll never forgive you.”

“That would be pretty bad,” Kakashi agreed, voice slurring.

“Stop talking,” Sakura said.

She worked quickly. Not only had he been gutted, but both his collarbone and left femur had been snapped clean in two, and he was suffering from severe chakra depletion. How he'd been able to make it back to the village, let alone to her apartment, she had no idea. Then again, much like Naruto, sheer, dogged determination—or pure insanity—could accomplish a lot.

She cut off his flak jacket with a chakra blade and peeled the torn wet fabric away from the wound. So much had been sliced up; his organs were in tatters. It took fifteen minutes of work to remove all of the dirt and debris from the cavity, and to kill any remaining bacteria, and another hour of intense concentration to repair the internal damage, and to get his body to start replenishing all the blood it had lost. All the while he stared at her, eye lidded and glassy, but focused, aware. By the end, she was sweating hard, blinking back exhaustion, but at least he wouldn't be dying anytime soon. Or _ever_ , if she had anything to say about it.

Finally, she realigned the broken bones.

“Ow,” Kakashi said, in the kind of grating, stiff tone that said he would have screamed in pain had he not been trained to suppress it.

“You’ll live,” Sakura said briskly, sealing the breaks. Then she wiped her forehead and gave him a relieved, lopsided smile. “Okay,” she said. “All done.”

As if he’d been waiting for her permission, his eye slid shut, and he was out like a light. Right there on her floor.

“Thanks,” she muttered. “Very helpful.”

She opted not to move him much, in order to allow his body to rest, and so went to her room for a spare pillow. She stuffed it under his head and covered him with a ratty blanket from the sofa. That done, she parked herself on the cushions, curled up into a ball, and drifted off watching his chest gently rise and fall in the moonlight falling in from her window.

 

* * *

 

Naturally, he was gone when she woke up.

But the blanket that had been on him was now draped over her, splotched brown-red in places. It smelled like blood and earth, and when she pulled it off, gave her a little shock of leftover static electricity.

She ran a critical eye over the bloodstains he’d left on her floor and windowsill and poor squashed pillow and sighed. No point in trying to get those out.

“Idiot,” she muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose. He could run from the hospital, but he couldn’t hide.

Well, not for very long, anyway.

 

* * *

 

She wasn't sure why she’d went to his door instead of crashing in through his window, like he'd done to her five months ago. Probably because she didn't have the strength to disarm any traps he might have set for anyone who’d dare to do just that, and she really didn’t want to die before she’d even had a chance to see him.

She knocked four times—unlucky number four, because she was dying—and let her weakened chakra signature leak into the air like a wave of spilled blood.

_You better be home, you lazy bastard,_ she thought, and almost laughed at her own hypocrisy. _Or I’m going to die on your doorstep, and then you’ll be sorry._

The door flew open. It was obvious Kakashi had been asleep just seconds before: his hair was a mess of wild white floss, flat on one side, and there was something weird happening on his face. It took her a second to process that he wasn’t wearing his mask, and that his bare features were arranged into an expression of naked concern.

“Kakashi-sensei,” she whispered, and listed forward. He caught her in his arms before she could fall to the floor and she sagged against him, unbearably dizzy, and distantly annoyed that she couldn’t even properly appreciate him with his mask off. Her vision was blurring. She felt nauseous.

“Sakura,” he was saying, supporting her over to the wall. He eased her down. “Tell me what you need.”

Right. She'd come here for a reason.

“Keep me awake,” she said. The hospital had seemed so far away, and would’ve been no use to her if she’d died on the way there. Unlike the excuse he’d given her, Kakashi’s apartment _was_ much closer than the heart of the village, and was her only option for survival. While the Sharingan couldn’t keep her from dying, it could keep her from falling unconscious. “I won’t… make it if you don’t. I’ve been poisoned. Need to… draw it out.”

He nodded once, opening his closed eye. She looked directly at it. It whirled, faster and faster, dragging her mind into abrupt lucidity.

She took rapid, shallow breaths. The world tilted violently as she fought to center herself. “Focus,” Kakashi said, and brushed her hair from her sticky forehead. “You can do this.”

Yes. She could. He was here, and he was helping, and that was good. But if she didn’t act quickly, it wouldn’t matter at all.

Slowly, she gathered chakra to her right palm, a pale green glow that lit Kakashi’s bare, serious face from below.

_Handsome,_ she thought deliriously, before she turned her attention to the hole in her gut, and put her trembling hand against the wound.

The needle was buried deep, and had punctured her small intestine. It would hurt coming out; she couldn’t spare the chakra necessary to dull her pain receptors. All of her dwindling energy had to go toward getting everything out as quickly as possible, before the poison finished eating away at her tenketsu. She panted and heaved like a wounded horse, both hands clawed over the wound, slowly inching the poison-tipped metal back out the way it came. Tears streaked down her cheeks. Kakashi wiped them away with his thumbs.

“Almost there,” she whispered hoarsely. Then it was out.

It fell to the floor by her thigh, and she sealed the hole it had made going in. “Don’t let it touch your skin,” she warned, barely able to vocalize the warning. Kakashi vanished and then reappeared with a pair of steel chopsticks and a small ceramic bowl. He picked up the needle, coated in her coagulating blood, and deposited it gingerly into the bowl, along with the chopsticks. He set it aside and she nodded, reassured.

Next: the hard part.

It was agony. The poison fought her every step of the way, clinging to her veins and chakra coils like tar. Still, the solid support of Kakashi’s chakra, sparking like electricity, kept her mind from collapsing into darkness. Each time she started to sink back into the sludge of nausea, the Sharingan pulled her back up, keeping her breathing steady, even as her heart slowed, as her muscles burned, as her eyelids drooped.

“Sakura,” Kakashi was saying, as if from very far away. His hand was cradling her jaw, keeping her head upright. “Is that all of it?”

She realized she’d been pulling, and pulling, but no more poison had been extracted: it was all out. She looked hazily at the little yellow marble of liquid, safely ensconced within the bubble of chakra in her hand. So tiny, so deadly.

“That’s it,” she murmured, and felt at first a pang of dull relief, and then a profound wave of gratitude. She wasn’t going to die. Kakashi hadn’t let her die—of course he hadn't. She raised her other hand to touch his jaw, slightly rough with fine silver stubble. She could barely see him through a dizzy, involuntary glaze of tears. “Thanks, Kakashi-sensei.”

He smiled. It was the first time she’d ever seen his bare mouth do that, and even heavily blurred, it was like watching the sun rise. She smiled back, feeling oddly buoyant, and let the poison flow into the ceramic cup to pool around the needle. Now that it was out of her, she could feel her chakra beginning to replenish, and used the glow of new energy to heal the wound in her gut.

“I'll… make an antidote later,” she mumbled, dropping her hand. Kakashi caught her wrist and squeezed it gently.

“You do that,” he said.

The Sharingan spun lazily, soothingly. She let it lull her into blissful unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

Sakura woke up very warm.

She opened her eyes. That was not the hospital ceiling. She followed a crack in the plaster down, down, until her eyes caught on a drooping potted plant and a photograph of Team Seven, back when they’d been genin. Beside it was a photograph of the Yondaime, and three kids—one of them with white hair and a mask: a tiny Kakashi. She blinked, and turned her head toward the smell of brewing coffee.

The adult Kakashi was standing there, his back to her, at a small kitchenette. The mask was back up, but he was bare-armed and barefooted, wearing loose grey sweatpants with what looked like holes chewed into the legs.

_Handsome_ , her mind supplied once more, unhelpfully. She watched him groggily, letting herself linger on his toned arms, the faded red ANBU tattoo, the way the tight black vest clung to the muscles of his back like a second skin; how the sweatpants hung on his ass. It was a really nice ass. She’d always thought so.

“Thank you,” Kakashi said, turning. He sounded dryly amused, and she abruptly realized she’d said it out loud. “Yours isn’t so bad either.”

She flushed. He wasn’t supposed to say that! Or notice her ass at all!

Instead of answering him, she tried to sit up, and discovered two things: one, she had a headache like a thunderclap, and two: she _couldn’t_ sit up, because she was blanketed by an entire pile of sleeping dogs. One of them—Shiba, if she remembered correctly—had his head resting on her sternum, and was looking at her with bleary dark eyes, wet and adorable.

Oh, that was low. She glared back up at Kakashi. His eyes curved. “I need to go to the hospital,” she explained calmly.

“So go,” he said.

“I can’t. I'm covered in dogs.”

“Then I guess you’re stuck here.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How is it that you can leave after I save your life, but I can’t?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You didn't think to cover me in slugs?”

“Like that would've stopped you,” she muttered darkly, even if the mental image of Kakashi crushed under many slimy, affectionate Katsuyu clones made her smile despite herself. Another one of the dogs, Bull, too big to fit on the bed, nudged her dangling hand with his big wet nose. “Oh, fine,” she whispered, and gave in, scratching him behind the ears. “I'll stay. But just for the morning, okay? Then I really have to go.”

“Sure,” Kakashi said cheerfully, plucking open a cupboard for another mug. “Hope you like coffee.”

She leaned back into Kakashi’s pillows, trying to contain a smile. “As dark as you can make it.”


End file.
